festal

festal, 11 months ago to fediverse

I still haven't made up my mind about blocking Meta's #Threads, codenamed #Project92 or #P92, supposedly supporting #ActivityPub, should it actually launch. As far as I can see, it's basically "keeping the evil surveillance corp. out" vs "avoiding nerdy self-marginalization".

Both are fair points. I guess, it depends. But on what? For the, the key point is if the Threads (or whatever its name) support easy migration (as Mastodon does). If that's the case, I would prefer not to block it, as it could be an offramp from the walled garden. If this feature is omitted, then i would be much more open to blocking.

But in the end, this should not be a decision by the admins, but a collective one by the users of the instance. #fedipact #Project92

tante, 13 days ago to random German

Ihr kennt ja immer alles. Ideen, wo man sich für ne Finanzierung zum Schreiben eines Buches bewerben kann (Sachbuch)?

festal, 9 days ago to random

It feels like big tech has basically given up and has retreated to indulging in escapist fantasies: space colonization, blockchain, AGI, the network state, metaverse, "hacking death", etc.

None of this solves any problems, or, even works as advertised.

festal, 1 year ago to random

This is not going well. Not for Google, not for us.

https://futurism.com/top-google-result-johannes-vermeer-ai-generated-knockoff

festal, 10 months ago to random

I'm very happy, After 25 years (!) of moderation and other near-daily care-taking work by @tb and myself, the nettime mailing list has been taken over by a fresh crew. This in itself is amazing.

https://tldr.nettime.org/@bot/110848024697055904

Hosting is provided by our friends @servus.

it's hard to overstate how important the list has been for me, intellectually, but also professionally, personally, socially, and emotionally.

And still is, but now as a simple subscriber and occasional contributor to the list.

tante, 23 days ago to random

"Google’s AI search has arrived, uninvited, to my browser, and I cannot make it leave. It isn’t just that it serves me crap whenever I enter a question into my search bar, but that I have to wait for all the crap I don't want in the first place."

(Original title: I Don’t Want To Spend My One Wild And Precious Life Dealing With Google’s AI Search)

https://aftermath.site/google-ai-search-god-no-why

clive, 10 days ago to random

Pointillist bubble-wrap paintings

amazing what you can do with paint

bubble wrap

and a hypodermic needle

Item #1 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe here here here 📬 : https://buttondown.email/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-20/

leitmedium, 10 days ago to Signal German

Meredith Whittaker, Präsidentin der gemeinnützigen Signal-Stiftung, die hinter dem Messenger #Signal steht, hat angekündigt, dass Signal im Falle der Umsetzung der geplanten Chatkontrollen sich aus dem Europäischen Markt zurückziehen wird.

> »Let there be no doubt: we will leave the EU market rather than undermine our privacy guarantees. This proposal--if passed and enforced against us--would require us to make this choice. It's surveillance wine in safety bottles. To be clear--we will stay to the end. We stand with the people in Europe & their right to privacy, whatever the Commission does. But we won't comply with any mandate to undermine our privacy guarantees. And noncompliance would result in our being barred from the market.«

Das würde wohl vor allem bedeuten, dass die App nicht mehr über App Stores zur Verfügung steht und theoretisch noch manuell installiert werden kann, aber letztlich wäre es wohl das Aus von Signal in Europa. (Hatte die letzten zwei Worte ursprünglich vergessen).

Quelle:
https://mastodon.world/
Bericht dazu:
https://www.golem.de/news/ueberwachung-statt-sicherheit-wenn-die-chatkontrolle-kommt-wuerde-signal-gehen-2406-185659.html

festal, 3 months ago to random

Ok, Google got a lot of flak for generating historically inaccurate but vaguely diverse images of, say, medieval British kings. Obviously, none of the actual kings were black or indigenous.

I must admit, I feel a tiny sliver of sympathy for Google. They are caught up in a lose-lose situation.

On the one hand, they can try to represent the data accurately, which also means simply accepting the bias in the data itself, thus naturalizing and perpetuating the injustices from which it stems.

Or can try to correct against that bias, thus misrepresenting the data, acknowledging that the data itself is not an accurate representation of the world, and/or that the world itself is biased (say, as in police records).

So, what do you do? There is not one single answer. Sometimes correcting is good, sometimes it's bad.

And this is why my sympathy is waver-thin. The problem is scale, the attempt to find one (engineering) solution for everything. That cannot work the moment you enter the territory of meaning, which is what generative AI (but also earlier forms like machine vision) is doing.

The problem is this one-size-all approach. But of course, this is what business demands. Silicon Valley is obsessed with scale. But to scale meaning making is not just a form of colonial violence, but will also generate lots of internal contradictions.

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2024/02/22/gemini-has-a-problem/

festal, 7 months ago to random

I noticed that I find AI generated visuals, particularly single images, only interesting when I also can read the prompt.

Otherwise, it's like being asked to impart meaning to a inherently meaningless product.

festal, 10 months ago to random

Went to see a superblock in Barcelona. Given how much they feature as urbanism of the future, they are amazingly simple. Take an intersection, block traffic in all four directions and you have a square. Plant trees, add some tables and benches. That's basically it. Replace cars with trees and don't privatize the resulting space. All you need, and all that is usually missing, is political will.

festal, 4 months ago to random

The world would probably be a better place if the absolute amount of computing power would no longer grow. Then development would have to focus on making things more efficient rather than relying on brute force everywhere.

festal, 4 months ago to random

"AI is the steam hammer of limited imagination, a solution to problems defined in administrative offices and enforced through predictive boundaries."

A beautiful sentence from @danmcquillan great "Resisiting AI" book.

festal, 9 months ago to random

A graphic novel as a way of (hi)story telling in news. I wonder of this was made with generative AI. Looks like to me.

https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/9/11/history-illustrated-pinochet-chiles-dark-legacy

festal, 8 months ago to random

This, as far as I can see, is beyond artistic experimentation, one of the very few socially interesting uses of LLMs.

With that, I mean it is not aimed at creating disinformation or simply raising efficiency regardless of quality.

It uses synthetic profiles to " study how different news feed algorithms shape the quality of online conversations."

But am I missing something?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.05984

festal, 4 months ago to random

It's probably a case of confirmation bias, but I had to impulse-buy this (comic) book on how the many ways in which the vision of space colonization makes no practical sense. After reading @pluralistic 's review:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

festal, 1 year ago to ai

What boggles my mind is that people who knowingly create massive problems can then turn around and worry about the massive problems as if they had not created them in the first place. #AI

festal, 6 months ago to random

At the heart of silicon valley techno culture is profound meaninglessness. Which bros try to fill up with all kinds of pseudo-spirtual nonsense.

#QT - https://mstdn.social/@hkrn/111450590917563045

festal, 1 month ago to random

I say this as a citizen of Europe (I know, this technically doesn't exist, but I still feel it's aspirational pull). The West is in its terminal phase.

Ukraine/Gaza policies might we'll be the final nail in the coffin of enlightenment values of critical reason and universal human rights. Unchecked capitalism is ripping societies apart, condemning large parts of the population to abuse and misery amidst incredible wealth. And the political system of representative democracy has been so captured by special interest that it can no longer enact broadly popular programs (social safety and environmental protection).

And the reactionary surge is only accelerating the decline.

festal, 9 months ago to random

Beyond the highly sanitized world of corporate AI, there is probably an AI trained for any possible fringe use. Of course, also for porn.

https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-porn-generative-artificial-intelligence

festal, 4 months ago to ai

The state of #AI, as summarized by @pluralistic

"We're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job."

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

festal, 3 months ago to random

Mastodon is really lacking discovery tools beyond the local and the federated timeline.

As a way to address this issue, @tante has set-up the @hypebot which forwards trending posts from a hand-curated list of instances.

You can find the list here:

https://github.com/tante/hypebot-config/blob/main/config.yaml

We want to update that list occasionally, to keep it interesting.

Any suggestion of instances that should be added?

festal, 1 month ago to random

If corporations are a form of slow AI, then what @pluralistic calls #enshittification is indicative of an "alignment problem", when the objective function (paperclip maximization) is persued by destructive means. And like all alignment problems, it has to do with a lack of, or the wrong, constraints.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/

festal, 8 days ago to random

Good starting point for any analysis of the impact of AI. From @brianmerchant recent newsletter:

"So the very first thing to understand is that, regardless of how this is framed in the media or McKinsey reports or internal memos, “AI” or “a robot” is never, ever going to take your job. It can’t. It’s not sentient, or capable of making decisions. Generative AI is not going to kill your job — but your manager might."

festal, 15 days ago to random

Wow. We barely started to talk about how bad private jet travel really is, and the US congress has already acted to protect the wealthy from public scrutiny.

https://www.twz.com/news-features/congress-has-made-fully-obscuring-aircraft-ownership-information-a-reality